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You know that clickety-clack sound roller-coaster cars make as they struggle toward the top of an incline? Can you hear the stock market clicking?

We know how this ride eventually ends. But investors who take profits risk bailing out on what many analysts say is more fun to come. Standard & Poor's U.S. Investment Policy Committee is looking for the S&P 500 index to top 1,670, up another 2.5%, within 12 months; theirs is one of the more conservative estimates.

So where can an individual investor keep an eye on market conditions and take some precautions against steep downgrades?

A good place to start is StockCharts.com. Rather than the usual chatter about macroeconomic impacts whose resolution is weeks or even years away, the site drills down on the many bull/bear struggles that drive market outcomes today.

One indicator often highlighted by Chief Technical Analyst John Murphy is the New York Stock Exchange Advance/Decline line. The ratio of advancing to declining issues indicates whether index gains have deep support or are susceptible to reversal. Senior Technical Analyst Arthur Hill gleans the same information by watching the percentage of S&P 500 stocks trading above their 50-day and 200-day moving averages.

Basically, the more issues advancing the better. But all technical signals should be viewed in context, something both Murphy and Hill provide in their daily e-mail commentaries. They identify primary market drivers with charts that illustrate key support and resistance levels.

Their commentary requires a StockCharts.com subscription, which starts at $15 a month and has four levels. But any visitor to the site can access StockCharts.com's library of key indicators on its Predefined Scans page (stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.scan) along with its Chart School explanations.

A POPULAR WAY TO protect gains without getting off the coaster is with a trailing stop. Online brokers like TD Ameritrade (tdameritrade.com) will let you place a limit order that automatically sells a position if its share price declines by either a pre-set dollar or percentage amount. The hard part is deciding on a retracement level that is comfortably outside a ticker's typical high-to-low daily swings.

One quick method to estimate that range is to find the longest candlesticks on a ticker's price chart, which gives you the various highs and lows over time. That's a couple mouse clicks on StockCharts.com or, for investors on the go, the new iPad charting applet ChartIQ (chartiq.com) whose subscriptions start at $5 monthly.

However, a problem with this tactic is the growing phenomenon of flash crashes resulting from minor technology snafus that grow into huge problems because of high-volume computerized trading. On April 23, the hacking of an Associated Press Twitter account caused indexes to crater for two minutes. Most investors weren't affected, but the 145-point drop in the Dow probably triggered some automatic sales.

EXITPOINT (exitpoint.com) has a couple of stop-loss options that might help prevent those kinds of unexpected ejections from the car. The first sets the limit price at a certain percentage below a stock's simple or exponential 10-to-250-day moving average. The fewer days chosen for the average, the more sensitive the trigger.

But a falling market tide can still lower (almost) all ships, so the second ExitPoint option lets you peg your sale price to a retracement in one of the popular indexes–the Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 or Wilshire 5000. Users decide the size of the buffer from index price changes and whether to average them over periods of one week to one year.

ExitPoint, whose subscriptions start at $11 monthly, doesn't execute trades; but rather, sends out e-mail alerts. The extra time to reconsider a trade could come in handy if the market gets its long-overdue 5%-plus correction.

But that could be just a stopover on the way to a 1,700 S&P index this summer, says investment banker Piper Jaffray (piperjaffray.com). It's telling clients to "use near-term pullbacks to add to positions."